Cartographers and reporters on adventure!
Welcome to the 3D box maps’ workshop! The children from Billund Skolen and the International School of Billund worked together to undertake an exploration of the place in which they live and how they got there. By creating a shared sense of place they could find connections between each other and to the physical landscape they belong to.
Lucy introduced the artists to different types of maps, such as topographical maps, navigational charts, political maps, and maps of the sky. Explorers, researchers, pirates, doctors, and astronauts have been using those reference tools to orient themselves, to understand their position and direction, and to leave a track of their own paths for future map-users. Maps come from the shared effort of a team, where each member contributes to its accuracy with their own adventures.
In the same way, our local artists had to draw their personal maps on a piece of paper, which they then used as a sketch for building - together with the others - a large, common 3D box-map. Culture Shift provided giant, rectangular cardboard boxes and lot of different scrap materials from
Skatkammaret, which the children could use to transform what they had in their minds and imaginations into reality.
Whilst sketching their ideas, a group of ten children was appointed democratically to be the reporters of the Belong project. They came out with me (Ambra), firstly visiting the Billund tourist office to take inspiration from brochures and flyers showing the best spots in the area, before trying to depict through pictures taken with disposable cameras, their favourite parts of Billund –– the best corners, shapes and textures.
After a brief introduction to the eye of the camera, the ten children went outside to capture the features of the landscape and buildings that appealed to them. The rain didn’t stop some of the Billund photographers from jumping around and experimenting with those small devices; accustomed to mobile phones and digital cameras, it was interesting to understand how imagination and pre-visualisation of your shots are important when you have a limited amount of pictures available.
Outside with the cameras, the reporters went through the same process as the cartographers who stayed inside Billund Centre sketching their models: the reporters sketched into their minds the picture that they wanted to recreate in reality when pressing the camera button.
When we got back to the auditorium, we took part with all the other children in the construction to the box maps!
Christopher Columbus didn’t use a map made in one day to cross the ocean. For this reason we will continue our elaborated box maps next time!
Tak for i dag!!